


Three to Five

by homesickblues, StellarRequiem



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, canon gore no on-screen violence, the elevator scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 19:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12778206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/pseuds/homesickblues, https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: Karen and Frank's moment in the elevator as how it felt, not just how it looked, and the silent conversations they had there.





	Three to Five

**Author's Note:**

> This is our first work since Ps1 dropped, but we run a kastle blog over at queensofthekastle.tumblr.com where we have other, spoiler-free fic (which this is not!)

**I.**

Three to five.

Three to five inches of shrapnel are currently protruding from Frank Castle’s right bicep; three being the low estimate of a not-too-deep laceration-- five being the more probable one where two or more jagged inches have torn through flesh and muscle to lodge into bone.

He’s already moving-- piecing together the next part of their plan, busting out the ceiling panel and tensing his muscles as he looks up at the climb.

“Frank,” she says, out of stunned horror, when she sees the piece of metal gnawing at his flesh. The second time she says it, it’s helpless.

“Frank…”

 _Oh, Frank_ …

She draws his attention to it, black eyes darting down before locking with hers again. It’s as if it’s a papercut, or the kind of bruise you get from stubbing your toe against a doorframe. Nothing. Background noise.

She wonders if he even feels it; if he’s even aware of the rivulets of blood striping his arm. For a man who’s lived the last years of his life knowing nothing but pain -- white hot pain that scrapes and saws at him from the inside -- outward pain seems to be only a distraction 

Karen can’t find it in herself to peel her eyes off of the gore of his arm. Intrusive thoughts plague her of how long he has until that foreign object sends him into septic shock, or how damaged the muscle will be from scar tissue when (and if) he finally finds time to heal. They’re distracted thoughts -- thoughts that don’t really have any relevance to her in that moment. Thoughts of things she’s helpless to do anything about.

When she looks back at him, he’s looking down. His dark eyelashes, she notices, are clumped and wet against his face.

 _Look at me_ , she wills him silently.

 _Look at me_.

When his eyes are on hers again, she isn’t looking at the Punisher. She’s looking at a man whose heart is bare and bloodied and unprotected and sitting in her hands.

 _He’s so lost_ …

 _Frank_.

Frank Castle looks at her like the end of the world. Frank Castle looks at her like she’s the first and last thing he’ll ever see. Frank Castle looks at her like he wants to stay.

 _Stay_ …

 _He can’t_.

Her head’s still buzzing from the explosion and she can’t get the image of Lewis Wilson splattered on every surface of that walk-in freezer out of her head. Her knees are knocking from the adrenaline of having a bomb pressed against her back. She could feel every inch of it through her blouse. These things that she’s feeling are visceral and loud. Her body’s telling her to scream. There’s been a scream building in her chest for twenty minutes now.

But all she feels under Frank’s gaze is quiet. She doesn’t hear her heart thumping violently against her ribcage like it’s trying to self destruct. She doesn’t hear the elevator alarm echoing off the corrugated metal. All she hears is Frank’s breathing -- _in, out, in_ \-- and _quiet_.

He scans her face, eyes blown wide and searching, like he’s trying to memorize her. A dying man trying to memorize the sunset. Like at any moment, she could evaporate into mist and he’d be left with nothing but a memory. It isn’t far off. She realized as soon as the elevator doors closed how uncertain the future was. How this might be the last time she’d ever see him. He knows it too, and the truth hangs in the air between them, unsaid but heavy as sin.

 _Make it count, Karen_ , she tells herself as she looks back, almost defiantly. Defiant not to him but to the universe for bringing him back to her, more alive than ever, only to wrench him away again.

She won’t break. Not in front of him.

If he memorizes her now, she realizes, she wants him to remember Karen Page as a woman who can take care of herself. A woman who he doesn’t need to protect. The shrapnel, the blood, the pain -- it’s all because Frank Castle decided she was a worthy enough cause to die for. And she wants him to stay. _God_ , she wants him to stay. But she refuses to be his weakness.

She wants him to know that she’s not afraid, even though she is. She’s not afraid, even though her heart is breaking and she’s sick of loss and grief.

 _Be brave_ , she tells herself.

Her eyes are on his lips, then. They’re the one part of him that isn’t covered in blood. She can feel his breath on her chin, his pulse from where her hand rests on his arm, and every cell in her body draws her to him like it’s nature. The fusion of two atoms out in space. The tide closing into the shore.

She doesn’t realize she’s tilted her head to kiss him until he stops it, instead pressing his forehead into hers and holding it there. It’s better. It’s quieter. They’re _alone_.

She’s overwhelmed by him all around her. He smells like smoke and iron-bitter blood. She can taste blood in her mouth, probably either from the impact of Frank’s body slamming into hers, or the tile smashing against her jaw after the explosion threw them there. The thumping ache in her head somehow feels like it’s a side-effect of him too.

 _Don’t leave me_ , she wants to whisper despite herself.

She doesn’t. 

 _You said you can’t lose me. What about how_ I _can’t lose_ you _?,_ she wants to say.

She doesn’t.

Those ghosts swimming around in his eyes? It’s not her place to banish them. As much as she longs to flood out his demons with light, she can’t. It’s not her place in his complicated, dark world.

When he pulls back, she feels a part of herself breaking off and staying with him. She doesn’t know if the next time she sees him will be on tv, or in a bodybag. She doesn’t know the next time she’ll have him in front of her. Breathing. Bleeding. Alive.

If she ever will.

Their time is running dry. The walls are closing in. She has to let him go.

“Go. Go on.”

He steps back obediently, toward the open panel above, and looks at her for answers. For clarity. For reassurance. He looks at her like he wants her to tell him to stay.

_Stay._

_No_.

She sets her shoulders and looks him square in the eye.

 _It’ll be okay_ , she wills at him without speaking. _I will be okay_ . _Go_.

 _Go_.

“Take care,” he says, before he’s gone.

She keeps her composure until the invisible thread between them is broken and he can’t see her anymore. Then she lets her world crumble.

Just a bit. Just enough to let it hurt, enough to put on her brave face again to protect him. Enough so she can get it out of her system and go back to pretending that she doesn’t love Frank Castle enough to know that he’s not a monster.

She’ll go back to pretending she doesn’t love him enough to let him go.

 

**II.**

 

Three to five: three to five minutes to get up twelve floors, up the escape ladder, pry open the door somehow, some way, crawl out and make for the stairs. Room 4022. But Karen, she’s saying his name, calling him off, calling him back, with her voice breaking.

“Frank.

“Frank,” she whispers, approaching with gentleness, even in her steps, to place her fingertips against his bicep.

She looks with wretched concern at the limb, covered in blood from the score on his temple and the chunk of shrapnel--glass, metal, whatever it is--sticking out of him. It looks worse than it is; the shoulder ripped from its socket is the real kicker. That shit, that hurts almost as much as the look on her face, the tears reddening the corners of her eyes, the cuts, the gashes, the blood and dust and sweat, smelling like fear, in her hair. She looks from the gore to his eyes with her face twisted in bitter, sweet sadness.

 _Oh, Frank,_ she’s telling him with that look, so much pain in her unspoken tone. He breaks her heart every goddamn time she sees him, he knows it. He knows he does. And he’s sorry, he’s so sorry, but--

But It was Karen. He couldn’t have left her. Dying wouldn’t have been excuse enough not to make it to her. _You were in danger. I had to._

She knows. He can tell. Her shattered heart is bleeding all over her face. He’d do so much worse than kill to put it back together for her.

He leans in to try and tell her that, with his eyes. He can’t speak right now. He’s past words. They’re both past words. They’re on now to feelings and gestures, and the gesture to come, her eyes on his, on his lips, his on hers, so close . . .

 _That’s_ where this is going.

He’s been in love enough times to know how a kiss goes. He’s felt it enough to know that you don’t walk away once you’ve committed, that you can’t stop once you start, that it’s complicated, that it asks something of the other person he has no right to ask. That he can’t, _he can’t--_

He meets her forehead first instead, the shape of their skulls fitted together like light and shadow.

And he feels it. He feels it in the depths of his chest, a weight bleeding out of him like a fountain, leaving first a chill and then a rush of warmth that radiates outward from her skin, from her hand receding from his arm just to come to rest again, holding onto him, moving him, following the sway of their pulses.

Her face, he could live forever in her closed eyes, the calm she’s trying to gift to him, the solace. He could sleep here. Die here. It’s quiet. It’s so quiet. The alarms, the screaming in his head, the memories and the horror and the death, the injustice, it’s like they’re all floating out past the sound barrier of a bomb blast, only his ears aren’t ringing over the top of all of it.  

When she pulls away, when all that noise comes back, it’s like the blast is inside of his skull.

When her breath isn’t right there on his skin making living real, it’s like waking up a corpse. And his only answer to her going, his only thought is what he knows must be the pitiful gaze of a wounded animal. _But Karen._

She’s going to cry, she’s halfway there already, she can hear him loud and clear and her eyes are saying _I know, I’m sorry_. She backs all the way up to the wall.

He gets it. If she stays, he won’t be able to go. She won’t be able to let him. And she knows--

He’s supposed to go. He’s supposed to go. But he stands rooted to the spot.

 _When will I see you?_ She’d asked him. Now he’s asking her, and her face says she doesn’t know. She can’t know. The answer to that hinges on whether he lives through what has to come next. Not through today, through this building, but after that after Rawlins after Homeland after _Bill_ \--

They’re all gonna die. They’re all gonna die, and Frank might just go to. But Karen . . . She’s the one thing he’d hate to leave.

_Promise me you’ll live if I don’t._

No answer, not really. She’s telling him to go out loud, now. Gentle urging beneath a steely-soft expression.

 _You live, Karen. Whatever you do, you live. Promise me._ He says it again and again with only his eyes because he doesn’t know how the hell to just say goodbye. If it is goodbye. Says it, screaming in silence, until she finally ducks her chin in a shadow of a nod and he knows that she understands, that she will make herself survive if she has to claw through every monster, every shitbag in this city. Only then can he let himself move.

“Take care.”

It hurts like a bitch, climbing out of there. And he can hear her, as he goes, trying not to cry, but they both know he’s running out of time.

  



End file.
